Microsoft ships Conductor CLI

Microsoft published Conductor on May 14 as an open-source command-line tool for defining and running multi-agent AI workflows in YAML, according to the company’s Open Source Blog. The release adds another Microsoft-backed approach to agent development, but one aimed at teams that want fixed routing, explicit state handling and reviewable workflow files rather than an LLM deciding what runs next. Jason Robert, a principal software engineer at Microsoft, wrote that the project was built around workflows with known structure, including code review pipelines, research assistants and plan-then-implement loops. The project is hosted in Microsoft’s GitHub organization under the MIT license. ### What did Microsoft actually ship? Microsoft described Conductor as a CLI for defining and running multi-agent workflows, with agents, prompts, models, inputs, outputs and routing logic declared in YAML. The company said Jinja2 templates and expression evaluation handle conditions and branching, while the workflow structure is fixed at definition time. (opensource.microsoft.com) GitHub’s repository page says Conductor works with the GitHub Copilot SDK and Anthropic Agents SDK. The README frames the tool around patterns such as evaluator-optimizer loops, parallel execution and human-in-the-loop gates. ### Why is the workflow file central to the design? Jason Robert wrote on May 14 that Microsoft wanted orchestration to be “deterministic and inspectable” rather than delegated to an LLM making routing decisions. He said the company also wanted context flow between agents to be explicit, support for multiple providers and models, and human oversight built into the workflow itself. (opensource.microsoft.com) (github.com) The workflow syntax reference in the repository shows top-level settings for an entry point, metadata, limits, hooks, context mode and runtime provider. The same document lists controls such as `max_iterations`, `timeout_seconds`, workflow metadata and instruction files that can be prepended to prompts, which makes the workflow file function as both execution plan and configuration surface. ### How does Conductor handle branching, retries and approval steps? (opensource.microsoft.com) Microsoft’s documentation says Conductor supports conditional routes, parallel groups and loop-back patterns. The examples directory includes templates and sample workflows for parallel research, validation, for-each processing, planning and a human-gate flow. A sample test workflow in the repository includes a linear chain, a three-agent parallel group, conditional routing, iteration, a script step, a human gate and a dynamic parallel for-each group. (github.com) The CLI reference also lists a `human-gate` template and a `loop` template, while the project README says users can skip gates for fully automated runs in some cases. ### Where does Microsoft place Conductor next to its other agent tools? (github.com) Microsoft’s blog says the company looked at Microsoft Agent Framework, or MAF, which it called Microsoft’s primary SDK for building agents in code. Robert wrote that Conductor covers many of the same primitives but offers “a different surface for similar patterns” — specifically, a YAML-first CLI for teams that want to compose agents and tools without writing SDK code. (github.com) That positioning is also visible in the repository, where Conductor is presented as a CLI rather than a hosted service. The workflow syntax file shows provider settings for `copilot` and `claude`, and the README describes the tool as a way to define and run workflows rather than embed orchestration logic directly in application code. ### What is available now? GitHub’s releases page shows Conductor version 0.1.14 as the latest tagged release as of May 15, 2026, with wheel and source packages attached. (opensource.microsoft.com) The repository also shows recent updates touching reasoning-effort configuration, Windows installation reliability, dashboard events and workflow resume behavior. Microsoft’s Open Source Blog post links readers to the project now, and the GitHub repository includes documentation pages for workflow syntax, CLI commands, parallel execution and examples. (github.com) Those materials are available immediately through Microsoft’s blog and the `microsoft/conductor` repository. (opensource.microsoft.com) (github.com)